Do we like them?Do we like Larry Page?
Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words of his own turned up, but the good is mostly hidden, there's a contested payout and a billionaire tax dodge.
Larry Page grew up in an academic household in Michigan, studied computer engineering at the University of Michigan, then went to Stanford for a master's degree. There he and Sergey Brin built a search engine and co-founded Google in 1998. He was Google's CEO twice and led its parent Alphabet from 2015 until stepping down in December 2019.
Page is famously private, so there's less goss here than for most billionaires. The biggest allegation on record came in 2019, when a shareholder lawsuit alleged he gave Android creator Andy Rubin a $150 million stock grant without first getting board approval. The suit alleged this while Rubin faced misconduct claims, and that a board committee gave a rubber stamp eight days later. The Fortune and Bloomberg report carried no response from Google or Page.
More recently, Page was named alongside Sundar Pichai and Sergey Brin in a shareholder derivative suit over Google's antitrust exposure. Google agreed in 2025 to spend $500 million over ten years on compliance to settle it, while denying wrongdoing. Shareholders get no payment, and the deal needed a judge's sign-off that the report didn't confirm.
On the harm test, we found no speeches, posts or campaigns of his own against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no pattern of platforming people who do. That's a gap as much as a clean sheet: he gives few interviews. Elon Musk has claimed Page was cavalier about AI safety and wanted digital super-intelligence, but that's Musk's account and Page hasn't been quoted in reply there.
The recent stoush is money. Business Insider and the Wall Street Journal reported that Page shifted his family office and other ventures out of California to Delaware and bought two Miami estates, ahead of the proposed Prop 40 tax. Fortune estimates he'd have owed nearly $15 billion had he stayed. That's legal, and he hasn't said why, but it's hard to square with a supportive-of-everyone brand when opponents of the tax spent over $187 million fighting it.
The good stuff is real but low-key. TechCrunch reported in 2019 that his foundation gave over $4.1 million to Shoo The Flu, which provides free flu shots to children and teachers at Bay Area schools, and that his Flu Lab backs work on a universal flu vaccine. The catch is the secrecy: he runs it through private companies, and a Stanford ethicist said billionaires shouldn't be able to hide the exercise of their power in LLCs.